No good deed. (Letters).

Gregg Easterbrook's is an entirely distorted and misleading review of Peter Singer's book on globalization ("The Greatest Good for the Greatest Number," November). I am currently using the book in a philosophy class I'm teaching, and it will be clear to anyone who has actually read it closely that Easterbrook has not himself done so, nor has he understood much else he has superficially gleaned of Singer. Singer, for example, has never claimed that we should become poor by giving most of our money away, as Easterbrook states; only that if the pleasure we can derive from keeping a given amount of money is entirely insignificant compared to the pleasure it can achieve in someone else's hands, then we must give it over.

Easterbrook's evident neoliberal bias leads him to misrepresent the text at almost every point. Never does Singer even claim that globalization has definitively made the poor better off. Indeed, the quote that Easterbrook gives as Singer's arguing that, without globalization, the income gap between the rich countries and the poor ones would be greater still--from page 88--is actually someone else's view, which Singer is calling into question. Ultimately, Singer explicitly states that the question of whether or not globalization has been good for the poor still cannot be answered without more research; see pages 89 and 90. The serious question that merits reflection, according to Singer, is how to ensure that the straitjacket be truly golden--making it more democratic and eliminating such WTO loopholes as the product/precis distinction.

DR. JULIAN FRIEDLAND
University of Colorado at Boulder

In 1995, in his book A Moment on the Earth, Gregg Easterbrook proclaimed that corporate capitalism had triumphed over all the Earth's and environmental woes because the corporate PR departments were assuring the world that they were implementing voluntary, market-driven "green" business practices. Right Now comes Pollyanna once again to tell us that corporate globalization is the way and the light in his review of Peter Singer's One World.

Easterbrook is dressing up the widening gap between rich and poor, standing on his head and squinting at it sideways to make it look like the opposite of what it is. There are a billion people living on a dollar a day, but their numbers are not growing quite as fast as the world's total population ... therefore absolute poverty is really, decreasing? Here's a stone-wall stat that can't be leapt over: Since we gave Mexico the "gift" of NAFTA in 1994, the percentage of Mexicans living in poverty has gone from 58 percent to 79 percent. This is a statistic that is simply there, not part of a conspiracy of the "loony left" to suppress the good news about globalization.

ANDREW CHRISTIE
Norfolk, Va.

Gregg Easterbrook replies: Julian Friedland accuses me of misrepresenting the content of One World "at almost every point" of a 3,000-word review that characterized dozens of contentions from the book. He then provides only one example, my statement that Peter Singer thinks that without globalization, developing nations would be worse off. This is an old trick--accusing someone of manifold errors, then having only one specific. Dr. Friedland goes further to declare himself in possession of extrassensory perception, as he asserts that he knows I did not pay attention when reading One World.

Turns out neither of us right about what appears on page 88. In writing that without globalization the developing world would be worse off, Singer was characterizing one possibility, and I was wrong to attribute the supposition to him. But Singer is not, as Dr. Friedland maintains, "calling into question" the view, merely presenting it. Singer later declares of globalization, "Most likely it has helped some to escape poverty and thrown others deeper into it." Whether it has been good or bad overall, Singer concludes, is unknowable.

The writer further objects to my saying Singer has advised Americans to give almost everything they possess to the developing world. Other than phrasing, however, it's hard to see what the difference is between Dr. Friedland's statement and mine. How could any given amount of money possessed by the 200 million middle-class Americans not be insignificant to them compared to what it could do for the 1.2 billion people who live on a dollar or less a day? Dr. Friedland's rule would require most Americans to give most what they posses to the developing world.

Andrew Christie declares that my book A Moment on the Earth "proclaimed that corporate capitalism had triumphed over all the Earth's environmental woes." Using my ESP, I know he hasn't read that book closely! Needless to say no such statement appears anywhere in the book, which goes into considerable detail about the need to address global warming and the many environmental problems of the developing world. And I'm not sure what definition of poverty Mr. Christie is using; the World Bank currently gives Mexican poverty at 10 percent based on the Mexican national definition and 38 percent based on international standards. Does anyone really suppose there would be less poverty in Mexico if NAFTA had not helped American companies move production and jobs there? Mexico's core social problem is rapid population growth; it's certainly possible that poverty is rising in Mexico despite NAFTA, but considering population growth, it might be rising even more if not for foreign investment.